The San Jose State Spartans took the field Saturday night and whether they knew it or not, they had the absolute loyalty of the 1990 team at their backs.
Absolute loyalty. Two words introduced to them as young men, two words that became a mantra that carried those Spartans through the 1990 season, two words that still bind them tightly 33 years later.
“Whenever we text each other,” said Ralph Martini, the quarterback of the 1990 team, “the last words are always ‘absolute loyalty.’”
Those two words ran like a current through a cocktail party at a Santa Clara hotel Friday night. Absolute loyalty. I heard it from the first person I interviewed to the last. At one point, I looked around the room to see everyone wearing shirts bearing those two words.
The 1990 Spartans, under a first-time head coach named Terry Shea, a man dropped into an impossible situation, went 9-2-1 and finished the season ranked No. 20 in the nation. Their only losses were by a point at Cal and a field goal at Washington.
“Four points from being undefeated,” said Bryce Burnett, the big tight end on that team.
The season opened with a 10-10 tie against Louisville, a team that went 10-1-1 and beat Alabama in the Fiesta Bowl. The following week came the 20-17 loss at Washington, a team that went 10-2, won the Rose Bowl and was ranked No. 5 in the final poll. The loss at Cal – 35-34 when a two-point conversion failed – came against a team that went 7-4-1 and won the Copper Bowl.
Yes, the only blemishes on the Spartans’ record came against teams that won a bowl game.
The Spartans won a bowl game too, routing Central Michigan 48-24 in the California Raisin Bowl, as good as it got for a program in the Big West Conference.
Although the timing of this reunion is peculiar – why the 33rd anniversary? – there is nothing random about the weekend they chose. Shea and the players had talked for years about having a reunion, ultimately figured on the 30th anniversary. COVID had its own plans.
Shea, 77, decided this would be the year. He and Ed Buller, one of his former assistant coaches, planned the event top to bottom. They got the hotel, set up the cocktail party Friday and the tailgate party Saturday, arranged for luxury-suite tickets from the athletic department.
They chose this game against Fresno State because that was the game in 1990 that meant the most to them.
It’s always a big game, a rivalry game, but the stakes could not have been higher on Nov. 17, 1990. It was the final game of the Big West season. First-place San Jose State (6-0) vs. second-place Fresno State (5-0-1). Winner gets a bowl game. Loser goes home.
Spartan Stadium had more than 30,000 seats back then – capacity today is 21,520 – and all of them were taken.
“The locker rooms were across the street then, so you walked across the parking lot, your cleats on the asphalt,” said Leon Hawthorne, the team’s burly fullback. “I’d never seen that many people there before. The place was packed. I still get chills talking about it.”
The big showdown was a smackdown. The Spartans won 42-7.
It was the last surprise in a season that had begun with the shocking dismissal of coach Claude Gilbert. A man whose name was synonymous with San Jose State football, a man whose name lives in the Ring of Honor at Spartan Stadium, Gilbert was fired in the spring over a recruiting dispute. The school wanted him to recruit more high school kids. Gilbert kept bringing in more junior college players.
It was “ugly… sad… traumatic” – all words that were used Friday night among others.
Gilbert is 91 now, Lives in Grass Valley, doesn’t get out much at all. Shea personally invited him down for the weekend, was trying to arrange transportation.
“That’s the kind of dude he is,” said Burnett, the tight end.
In the end, Gilbert decided he just couldn’t make the trip. Shea understood, but had been holding out hope all week.
“So many of these players were his players.” Shea said.
Shea had been Gilbert’s offensive coordinator for three seasons at SJSU. He had left to serve the same role for Bruce Snyder at Cal, then was hired by SJSU to replace Gilbert.
As words, “absolute loyalty” was something Shea had heard from Snyder years earlier, possibly before the Cal years when they were together at Utah State. Shea made it his whole program, he said, and he introduced it to his team at one of his first meetings.
“I remember drawing a big triangle on the board for them,” he said, “and telling them, ‘This is what absolute loyalty is.’”
At each point of the triangle was a word: coaches, players, self. Arrows ran from each word to the next, going in both directions. Everyone has everyone’s back.
“That mantra brought us all together,” Martini said. “It means loyalty to your school, your teammates, your family, yourself – everything.”
That mantra brought them together this weekend. They came from Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington and points between.
Shea, an emotional man, had tears in his eyes much of the night. He was hardly alone.
“I got choked up the minute I saw him,” Martini said.
I came upon the two of them late in the evening. The two of them were at a table, hovering over a book Shea had published in 2011 about the art of quarterbacking. He had sent a book to Martini with an inscription that had brought Martini to tears. One of his tears had fallen onto the page, making a mess of the inscription.
When I came upon them, Shea was performing repairs, retracing the words that had been washed away.
Not long after, Shea said his goodbyes and headed up to his room at the hotel. On my way out, I stopped to take a look back at the bar. A couple dozen men in their 50s, with the spirit of college students, had their glasses raised high for a two-word toast they shouted in unison.
“Absolute loyalty!”
